Which Social Media Platforms are Used the Most?

Social media is undoubtedly on the rise. People use it to connect with long-lost friends and businesses use it to establish themselves online and drive sales. Your online reputation is very important in this age, and the age of people getting on these social networking platforms is increasingly younger each year.

But the question is, which social media platform wins the popularity contest? The point of Facebook, Twitter, etc. is to establish your reputation, create a perception of yourself, and share stuff with others that you find interesting and cool (and hope that others like them too…). Here is a look at how we are spending our time online, specifically in the social media sphere.

Popular Social Networking Platforms

In 2011 Facebook surpassed web-giant Google as the head honcho in traffic. Although it looks as though Facebook towers over Linkedin and Twitter, the two lesser social networking sites still get an impressive amount of traffic.

Facebook has 650 million users with 250 million users checking it daily. Facebook has become the #1 way for people to get in touch and share ideas.

Twitter has almost 200 million users. However, a lot of these profiles are not active. Only about 50 million (estimated) users use Twitter on a regular basis. Nonetheless, in 2011, Twitter has set the bar for web activity with an amazing 95 million tweets per day.

Linkedin, although it seems like it doesn’t get any traffic compared to the other two, has 100 million users with over half of them using it on a regular basis. Linkedin has a different purpose than a site like Facebook or Twitter. Linkedin is more for networking your professional network and has established itself as a reputable source for finding jobs and creating your professional circle. Think of it as more of a more exclusive Facebook.

Which Social Networking Sites Do We Use for Sharing?

It’s no surprise that we use Facebook the most for our sharing. It might be surprising that twitter isn’t higher up in terms of our online sharing scale, but when you think of the low number of active users, it makes sense. We still do a lot of our sharing via email and print (likely due to the older generations that are becoming increasingly more tech savvy, but still cannot keep up with the social networking antics of the younger generations).

In ten years, I predict that more people will be on twitter, MySpace will slowly be phased out, Facebook will still top the charts, and forums like Reddit (not Digg… that should be phased out in a few years) will top the charts. Don’t put Google on the backburner – more than likely Google will come up with some social networking site to outweigh the others. My prediction that it will be something that incorporates a Facebook-like profile, a Twitter-like mini-blog, and YouTube (but please leave Buzz alone Google; leave that one be as a failed experiment).

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